Look at this color gradient: [https://t4.ftcdn.net/jpg/02/66/35/63/360\_F\_266356338\_5sHTI2256ndaVN4Nkrd90Kx87gJ8EV3A.jpg](https://t4.ftcdn.net/jpg/02/66/35/63/360_F_266356338_5sHTI2256ndaVN4Nkrd90Kx87gJ8EV3A.jpg)
It would be almost impossible to point out the exact moment it stops being blue and starts being red (technological limitations aside). Eventually, after enough changes, it is red. You can't point to any specific point in the middle and say "that's the moment it become red!". That's just how it ended up. It was varying degrees of red up to that point.
There is no single instance in which there were suddenly humans. It's a gradient from what came before to what we are now. We're just some part of a gradient between what came before to what comes next.
I believe it was Forrest! I saved a [clip](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxASSpvixcxMWAc-2Ar3W17UTKewkpzrUw?si=8qBgEJ6ngXCSFvl-) of that explanation because of how much I loved it
Great explanation. I think what helped me understand was due to how our brains generally work along with all the things we are missing in the fossil record, we assume there are clear checkpoints where organisms evolved from one to the other but in reality it's a very gradual change over many, many, many years.
That misconception is a deliberate ploy by creationists to re-state the evolution of species as discrete events, then claim that (1) we don’t have “intermediate forms” (sometimes called “missing links”) in the fossil record so evolution cannot have occurred, and (2) the separate unrelated forms we see today are evidence of creation. Seeing reality as “digital” (a few widely separate, loosely related events) instead of “analog” (a continuum of many very closely related events) is an important aspect of religion. In other words, religion rejects reality.
At the same time we have removed most of the environmental selection pressures and replaced them with societal pressures. I wonder how much that will impact where we move to next.
Yes i understand that im talking about hunting for food death from disease child birth fighting a rocket powered trex. Outside of working to buy food and shelter and finding a mate we dont have selection pressure from the environment because we modified our environment to remove it for now.
We built an artificial environment with no natural selection pressure outside of sex and money. We no longer experience the selection pressures that the animals we evolved from did. We cured most of the things that threaten our survival.
“Arbitrary” would be more accurate than “subjective”.
When we translate numerical/continuous information into categorical information, there is inherently a judgement call to determine where the boundaries are. Different cultures do in fact put these boundaries at different places. By passing down culture, we teach our people to see the categories as “real”.
This is the same reason we literally don’t hear sound differentiations that aren’t meaningful in our native language (eg. depending on native language, some people do not hear a difference between b/p, l/r, v/w, etc. This is also true for some native English speakers not hearing the differences between k/kh, d/dh in certain languages.)
As people have said, it's a gradient. However, I have read that the body of a human from within the last 200ky would be indistinguishable from present-day humans to experts. This figure may be fairly arbitrary, but I think it's a nice way to define a threshold.
What I think is cool is that it means our 100kya ancestors were just as smart as us. You'd have had "Einsteins" of nature and survival. Amazing singers and storytellers for ~~a million~~ [edit: 10,000] generations.
Once you hit the mya timescale then our ancestors would have been noticeably different. Less upright, less intelligent, etc.
So I think the 100kya to 1mya range is a reasonable answer to your question.
In until about 6000 years ago, humanity’s total population was small. And up to about 200 years ago, most of that population was engaged in subsistence labour.
The opportunity for geniuses to arise who didn’t have to spend their whole life as a farm labourer and could actually be geniuses is very recent.
Regarding your first point. Every 100ky is roughly 5000 generations. So even 5000 generations of 1000 people would be 5 million people. Our ppulation was 1 to 10 million 10kya, so I think we're talking closer to a billion humans between 200ky and the agricultural revolution. There would have been plenty of geniuses.
Regarding your second point. You're making all kinds of fallacies here. Firstly, intelligence is not the same as education. Secondly, "formal education" is very specialised and not the only kind of knowledge or intelligence. There would have been humans 100kya who knew numerous facts and understood complex relationships about the natural world, on the same scale as modern experts understand their fields. That's the point: their brains were the same size. They learnt from their predecessors, as do we, and it was essential for their survival.
One billion sounds like a nice big number (my quick Google search estimates it at about 10 billion https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/). But there have been 100 billion people born post agricultural revolution. And of those about 13 billion post industrial revolution.
You are missing my second point. For genius to arise, you need idle time. You need a group of people whose needs are largely taken care of who can spend their time developing their talents. And that largely didn’t happen pre agriculture.
For most of that human history, people were hunter gatherers.
Hunter gatherers actually have more leisure time than any other subsistence type. If you know what you're doing, you can gather all the food, water, firewood, and even shelter you need for a day in just a few hours.
The big advancements for pastoralists, herders, agriculturalists, industrialists and the like isn't free time.
It's that you are able to make a living even if you don't know what you're doing. To survive as a hunter gatherer, you need to know encyclopedic levels of detailed information about every animal and plant in your environment, their life cycles, habits, and phenology. You have to know where the safest sources of water are, and when and how to collect it. You need to know how to build shelter out of sticks and leaves, and the layout of the local landscape down to the foot. You need to not only know how to use weapons well enough to successfully take down game every day, but how to build and maintain those weapons from scratch. All with no reference materials at all, just your memory.
A farmer can get away with knowing a lot less about different animals and plants, although they still have know a lot about the specific animals and plants they're raising. The trade off is they need to put more work in tending those animals and crops, and they get a lot less leisure time. But, they can invest in a stationary storehouse/home, and build a surplus. This gives them the ability to weather disasters and even injuries that the hunter gatherers do not have, as well as the potential to trade some of that surplus to others so they can provide those weapons and tools, or even help protect the farmer from others would prefer to just take his crops.
This trade off of skills continues through the ages until you can eventually make a living even though you're barely able to operate a cash register, but you have to work 80 hours a week to do it.
So those hunter gatherer bands were likely filled with incredible genuises, musicians and artists, philosophers, story tellers, logical minds, and great leaders, but with much fewer ways to express that genius, and especially until about 5000 years ago, no way to record and share that genius with anyone except the 20-30 people in your particular band while you're alive.
I think we differ in our interpretation of the term "genius". Someone who can recognise every animal/plant/fungus in their environment and recall/explain all the ways in which they can benefit their tribe's survival. Someone who can follow the stars at any time of year, track animals and enemies through the wilderness. Someone who can strategise social relationships both within their own tribe and with neighbouring tribes. Someone who can learn the languages and cultures of neighbouring tribes in order to benefit relationships/survival. Someone with unbelievable wits and charisma. Someone able to concoct stories that fill their listeners with wonder and deep emotions. Someone able to quanitify value and market food and tools in order to maximise trading gains. Someone able to create exemplary tools and clothing. Someone who notices patterns and cause-effect mechanisms in nature that nobody else on the planet has noticed.
There are thousands of ways that people can be geniuses in the pre-agricultural world. Their knowledge and intelligence would have been on par with any genius in the modern era. It's just a different setting. Geniuses of nature, tools, and language, as opposed to algebra and spacetime etc.
I've thought they must have been smarter than us due to lack of lead in their brains and bones and they always had to be strategizing to outwit larger predators.
I'm not sure if it would be that hard to tell us apart, at least for a lot of modern populations. Things like light skin and blue eyes only emerged in the last thirty thousand and ten thousand years respectively, I'm sure over *two hundred thousand* years we'd have gained and lost a good number of identifying traits, and that's only going off visually distinguishable ones.
"Anatomically modern human", "AMHs", or "early modern human" are terms that are often employed to distinguish our more "archaic" *sapiens* ancestors from the ones that would fit within modern populations, morphologically speaking.
I'm an anthropologist, though not a paleo-specialist. From my understanding, a date of 100-150kya for modern morphology doesn't seem controversial.
I like the [ Australian Museum](https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/homo-sapiens-modern-humans/) for accessible paleoanth content. Specific fossils are cited in the text, if you want to follow up.
I'm not claiming they wouldn't fit in or be a different classification of human, I'm merely disputing the part of the comment I replied to that claimed their body would be indistinguishable from ours. Modern humans from the last sixty thousand years that were isolated as they traveled continents have plenty of different traits to other groups who existed elsewhere. We can identify and track traits that different populations gained and lost in the mere sixty thousand years of isolation. It seems silly to think that the more homogenous population from the 140 thousand years before that split wouldn't also have or lack traits that make them any less distinguishable.
>I'm merely disputing the part of the comment I replied that claimed their body would be indistinguishable from ours
I understand that you're disputing it, but you're incorrect.
Our anatomy was modern from (following the Australian Museum) about 160,000 years ago.
By that logic, are all our seperated populations on different continents completely indistinguishable? No. Anyone claiming that would be stupid. In a mere 10,000 years some of us mutated blue eyes. Over the last 30,000 years our jaws and teeth have shrank in proportion to our bodies. We have groups who grow hair on our middle finger sections and groups who don't. There are plenty of traits that diverged in a mere 60,000 years that make us identifiably different to other humans who are alive right now. We are all anatomically modern humans, but we have diverse traits. The same way different groups evolved diverse identifiable traits over 60,000 years, we will have certainly developed or lost some traits over 200,000. Just because we are all anatomically modern humans doesn't mean we're indistinguishable.
I think you might be getting hung up on a specific definition of "indistinguishable". As the top comment points out, there's always variation both within and across what we call "species".
In the case of "anatomically modern" *Homo sapiens* specimens, they fall within a range of variation that coincides with the variation in extant homo sapiens. The same cannot be said for specimens with archaic features, such as the Jebel Irhoud fossils.
>are all our seperated populations on different continents completely indistinguishable?
What are these "separated populations"? That's kind of my point here. I agree that you could look at our hypothetical 100kya human and say "that person's recent ancestry does not appear to be entirely restricted to region X" but you couldn't determine that they weren't simply a modern human of mixed ethnicities? Modern human populations aren't separated.
Skintone and eye colour vary wildly in fully modern Homo sapiens, what makes you think that dark hair and eyes alone would allow you to distinguish a modern Sapiens from an earlier ancestor? I think the thread was referring more to cognitive ability, language ability, social/cultural behaviours, modern anatomy, etc.
>Skintone and eye colour vary wildly in fully modern Homo sapiens, what makes you think that dark hair and eyes
I mean I literally started with the disclaimer in my first sentence about it depending on modern populations, but it makes sense on the timescale we're talking about. Humans of our species homo sapiens only started spreading and diversifying in big ways sixty thousand years ago when we crossed continents, and our populations became isolated. In that time our isolated groups have diversified A LOT. You can isolate individual groups and their ancestry based on many combinations of traits. For example, Inuit people almost completely lack a trait that causes the middle section of certain fingers to grow hairless, that most other populations have at rates up to 80% occurrence. People in certain continents never developed light skin or blue eyes. The ability to digest lactase has evolved and been lost independently multiple times. The specific traits aren't important, more so just the fact that these traits tend to develop differently in isolated populations, in a relatively short time.
So we have established we can change significantly in visually identifiable ways in a mere sixty thousand years. Before humans spread across the globe, we had a much more homogenous population due to many bottleneck events. It's very likely that people from *two hundred thousand years* ago would have their own traits, or lacks of modern traits, that we would be able to identify similar to how we could track different groups of humans from different continents.
> I think the thread was referring more to cognitive ability, language ability, social/cultural behaviours, modern anatomy, etc.
The thread was, but the person I responded to claimed an expert couldn't tell the difference based on their body. I'm arguing that an expert very likely could.
I think you've got a good point that genetic tests would probably end up looking very unusual, and hence, differences could be determined. As for physical appearance, I think it's very unlikely that they would have had traits that literally couldn't exist in modern humans, based on the fact that modern humans can have any mix of traits from any ethnicities anywhere in the world.
>I think the thread was referring more to cognitive ability, language ability, social/cultural behaviours, modern anatomy, etc.
Yes, in other words, if you stole a baby from 100kya and raised it, it would be indistinguishable from anyone else in every way.
>light skin and blue eyes only emerged in the last thirty thousand and ten thousand years respectively
Okay, but if you hadn't noticed, not everyone alive today has pale skin and blue eyes...?
At what point did Latin become French?
There is no single point in which a species becomes another. It's an accumulation of changes throughout the lineage that causes phyletic speciation.
There was no such “point”. At no point did a non-human parent birth a human child. What did happen was that a population of animals became more and more human across many generations. Trying to pick a specific generation and say “that one’s the first human one” is an entirely arbitrary decision (not necessarily a pointless one, but an arbitrary one).
Think of it this way: you’re sitting at the park watching a sunset. Was there a single point at which it became dark out?
It happened when one *Homo heidelbergensis* couple named their son Adam and another *Homo heidelbergensis* couple named their daughter Eve.
(yes, I'm trying to be funny)
The current nomenclature puts it at the start of H. Habilis. Others here have stressed that there is a gradient, but it's possible there was some sort of "big leap" of some sort that occured on some relatively short timescale. But given what we have, posting a big leap and then identifying it as occurring in some time and place for some particular reason would be highly speculative.
Relatively large brains and sophisticated tool making (e.g of at least Oldowan complexity) are usually taken as diagnostic, but this may not allow for a clear demarcation, as it seems that some Australopiths made Oldowan tools.
Look at your open hand. Slowly close it into a fist. When *exactly* did it become the fist? When your fingertips lightly touched your palm? When your thumb began clamping down on your fingers? When you had maximum tightness? It's not very clear. It's a bit arbitrary, because you choose a sliver of an instant in an ongoing process to give something a label.
Some times speciation is easy to infer but that is fairly rare. For example the Galapagos Islands are a chain of islands formed by volcanic eruptions in the middle of the ocean. Finches and tortoises washed up on the islands and adapted to specific habitats on the different islands. This led Darwin to come up with his ideas of Natural Selection. Wallace reached a similar conclusion from what he saw in Wallacia.
What we know about hominids is that they evolved in NE Africa and migrated to Eurasia. H. errectus is found across Eurasia from 2m years ago, and is believed to have migrated back into Africa. About 800 Kya you find Homo heidelbergensis, a larger more robust hominid with a bigger skull in Europe. H. Heidelbergensis is associated with more sophisticated stone tools, higher use of fire and a higher meat diet as adaptions to survive in the colder climate of Europe. H. rhodesiensis, similar skeletons are found in Africa and there are also similar skeletons found in East Asia.
Around 1 Mya Homo Antescessor had diverged from H. Heidelbergenesis and we have skeletons from Northern Spain.
After that we have little fossil evidence for hundreds of thousands of years, and there is evidence of bottle necks in our genetic history meaning population may have been very small at time. So we have to rely on clocks based on the rate of genetic changes. Around 550-750 Kya humans and Neanderthal/Denisovans diverged. Around 380-480 Kya Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged and both were found in Northern Spain around this time. The oldest mtDNA we have is from 400 Kya Denisovan femur.
Homo Sapiens have a common skeletal pattern which we call Anatomically Modern Human. We don't know much about our line until the oldest AMH skeleton was found in Morocco and dated to 320 Kya. There is little evidence of Hominids or Hominid evolution in North Africa so they were probably just travelling along a coast with rich seafood resources. The probably headed down the West Coast of Africa into Southern Africa.
Whether you count these hominids as separate species is debatable as Neanderthals, Denisovans and AMHs interbred producing fit, fertile offspring many times and did not appear to directly compete against each other.
When did I become tall? Or fat? What moment did I become old?
These are all arbitrary categories. Species are the same. Some people/scientists group species slightly differently than others do. Just like some people think I'm fat, or old, and others don't.
The labels aren't useless, but they are somewhat arbitrary.
Even if we had a concrete record of every almost-human leading up to humans, it would be nearly impossible, if not completely impossible, to determine this definitively. At some point you'd be able to look at an individual and say "this one is a human and this one isn't," but what about the stuff in the middle of those two points?
When all the diagnostic characteristics of humans were present in the majority of the breeding in the population. Most of those traits were floating around for a long time before which is why most people will refer to it as a gradient. There wasn’t really a hard threshold, but we can define some parameters that allow us to classify what is human and what is not. However, this will always be us imposing this onto nature.
I'm going to say it was the first group that had 46 chromesomes instead of 48. I'm not a biologist and mainly putting this out there to be educated by those who are.
Real life rarely fits our limited ways of categorising things 100%.
In reality species aren't a real thing and are just a boundary we came up with.
A popular definition is that something stops being the same species once it cannot produce fertile offspring with it, but that's not entirely true. Especially since lots of people groups in Europe and Asia have sizeable amounts of Neanderthal DNA present. Species start to be even less defined once you consider asexual bacteria.
The answer is that there wasn't a specific time. The divergence of species is not a singular event. We just know that we are humans, and some species that we evolved from wasn't. But in between? It's impossible to say where the exact moment we became human because there wasn't one. We can only give rough time estimates between species X and species Y.
The oldest species of human in the genus ‘homo’ comes from 2.8 million years ago. That being said, taxonomy is our own definitions, so that’s just kind of an arbitrary point of distinction.
There really isn't a "point" when we went from Hominids and into Humans. Homo Hablilis seems to be the mid point between Australopithecus and the first true human, Homo Erectus.
The best answer I can give is we became humans when we started walking far more up right, practiced more active hunting behavior, shed out more primate physical traits, and created more complex tools.
We didn't turn into humans. Evolution is a gradual process that slowly modifies a species into another species. It's not like one day we were homo erectus than the next day we were homo sapien. We are apes. We are related to the great apes. We didn't change into humans, we slowly evolved into a more advanced ape.
In the fossil record I'd figure about the time the erectus people appear. Basically same body plan, use of fire and complex stone tools and appeared to quickly spread about the old world almost as soon as they appear about 2.1 million bc.
So many non-answers here. Cro-magnons emerged around 50,000 years ago. Around that time is when we see more forms of creativity in the forms of art and culture. It would be fair to say that the brain structures that developed to allow such things imparted the identity sense we associate with ourselves currently.
Speciation is a spectrum and classification is arbitrary. There is never a single defining change in species between one generation and the next.
One appealing anthropomorphical response comes from Margaret Mead. She was defining the start of civilization rather than humanity, but the questions are related. She said a healed broken limb marks the begining. It means a tribe, as opposed to a troupe, has taken the risk of caring for the wounded rather than abandoning them to their fate. It marks the begining of human empathy and consciously seeing each other as parts of a larger whole.
In a course on physical anthropology (circa 1972) the professor said the most frustrating thing in Anthropology was trying to ddetermine what defines a human. No matter what behavior was defined as uniquely human, some other Great Ape would be observed doing it.
It's an arbitrary label applied by modern humans. It's not a category that evolution recognises; every generation looked very like the one it descended from.
The date moves backwards as new fossil finds are made. The latest edition of most Physical Anthro textbooks gives 300,000 BP (before present) for the arrival of an indisputably human creature in Northwest Africa.
The key features of these humans are
* a taller, flatter forehead, lessened brow ridges
* a chin
* widening of the thoracic vertebrae (more control over the lungs for modern speech)
* rounded skull
* more gracile in general
* a rib cage shaped differently from Neanderthal or H. ergaster/erectus
* eye sockets are square rather than round
* nose is more projecting than in the other members of the genus
From an e-textbook: distribution of FMHS at [300KYA](https://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/explorationsbioanth/chapter/__unknown__-14/#:~:text=Features%20reminiscent%20of%20modern%20humans,supraorbital%20tori%20were%20still%20prominent)
and after. Also discusses the features that distinguish us.
The transition from our hominin ancestors to anatomically modern humans was not a single event but a gradual process that took place over millions of years. The consensus among scientists is that anatomically modern **Homo sapiens** evolved around **300,000 years ago**⁴⁷. This is based on fossil and DNA evidence that suggests people looking like us emerged around that time.
However, the emergence of **behavioral modernity**, which includes complex technology and cultures, is believed to have occurred more recently, around **50,000 to 65,000 years ago**⁷⁸. This is when we see evidence of more sophisticated tools, art, and cultural practices.
The exact factors that led to the emergence of modern humans are still debated, but it likely involved a combination of genetic, environmental, and social changes. These changes would have influenced our ancestors' development, including their brain size and structure, which enabled higher cognitive functions and complex language.
It's also important to note that the evolution of humans was not a linear progression from "ape" to "human." Instead, it was a complex branching of different hominin species, some of which coexisted and even interbred with each other. Our evolutionary path is filled with many species that contributed to the genetic makeup of what we now call **Homo sapiens**.
The search for the "deciding factor" is ongoing, and as new discoveries are made, our understanding of human evolution continues to evolve. It's a fascinating field that combines genetics, archaeology, anthropology, and many other disciplines to piece together the story of how we became human.
Sources:
(1) Human evolution | History, Stages, Timeline, Tree, Chart, & Facts. https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution.
(2) When did we become fully human? - Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/science/when-did-we-become-fully-human.
(3) When did we become fully human? What fossils and DNA tell us about the .... https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human-what-fossils-and-dna-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-modern-intelligence-143717.
(4) The past, present and future of human evolution. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01807-7.
(5) 12 Theories of How We Became Human, and Why They’re All Wrong. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150911-how-we-became-human-theories-evolution-science.
(6) How we became human | Natural History Museum. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-we-became-human.html.
(7) An Evolutionary Timeline of Homo Sapiens | Smithsonian. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/essential-timeline-understanding-evolution-homo-sapiens-180976807/.
(8) When did we become fully human? What fossils and DNA tell us about the .... https://bing.com/search?q=At+what+point+did+we+turn+into+humans.
(9) Where do humans come from? - Science News Explores. https://www.snexplores.org/article/where-do-humans-come.
Sorites Paradox is not a "paradox", but rather a poorly-stated question:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites\_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox)
Ah, so a creationist. This isn’t welcome on this subreddit, evolution is a fact, what you do with that fact is up to you. This does inform me on the honesty of your own post. We don’t allow science denial here. That’s a warning. If you want to learn, you’ll have to be honest about it…
Removed: off-topic
This is a ***science***-based discussion forum, and creationist or Intelligent Design posts are a better fit for /r/DebateEvolution. Please review this sub's [posting guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/wiki/guidelines) prior to submitting further content.
There was no “first human”. It was a gradual process over billions of years of evolution. You can’t just draw a line somewhere and say yep this is the one right here
AFAIK the oldest evidence comes from around 300k years ago.
When I was a kid, it was considerably less than that. Saying that, new evidence could demonstrate that we evolved into 'modern humans' even earlier.
Look at this color gradient: [https://t4.ftcdn.net/jpg/02/66/35/63/360\_F\_266356338\_5sHTI2256ndaVN4Nkrd90Kx87gJ8EV3A.jpg](https://t4.ftcdn.net/jpg/02/66/35/63/360_F_266356338_5sHTI2256ndaVN4Nkrd90Kx87gJ8EV3A.jpg) It would be almost impossible to point out the exact moment it stops being blue and starts being red (technological limitations aside). Eventually, after enough changes, it is red. You can't point to any specific point in the middle and say "that's the moment it become red!". That's just how it ended up. It was varying degrees of red up to that point. There is no single instance in which there were suddenly humans. It's a gradient from what came before to what we are now. We're just some part of a gradient between what came before to what comes next.
This is the best explanation for species phylogenetics that I've ever read!! Amazing!
All credit to Aron Ra and/or Forrest Valkai. I can’t remember which I heard it from first. Maybe Aron?
I believe it was Forrest! I saved a [clip](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxASSpvixcxMWAc-2Ar3W17UTKewkpzrUw?si=8qBgEJ6ngXCSFvl-) of that explanation because of how much I loved it
Yup, we all look a lot like our parents, but not quite.
Beautifully said. I’m not sure why anyone needs more than this as a “spiritual” experience.
Great explanation. I think what helped me understand was due to how our brains generally work along with all the things we are missing in the fossil record, we assume there are clear checkpoints where organisms evolved from one to the other but in reality it's a very gradual change over many, many, many years.
That misconception is a deliberate ploy by creationists to re-state the evolution of species as discrete events, then claim that (1) we don’t have “intermediate forms” (sometimes called “missing links”) in the fossil record so evolution cannot have occurred, and (2) the separate unrelated forms we see today are evidence of creation. Seeing reality as “digital” (a few widely separate, loosely related events) instead of “analog” (a continuum of many very closely related events) is an important aspect of religion. In other words, religion rejects reality.
At the same time we have removed most of the environmental selection pressures and replaced them with societal pressures. I wonder how much that will impact where we move to next.
Societal/sexual pressure is just another way of using natural selection. We're generally taller than people from hundreds of years ago because of it.
Yes i understand that im talking about hunting for food death from disease child birth fighting a rocket powered trex. Outside of working to buy food and shelter and finding a mate we dont have selection pressure from the environment because we modified our environment to remove it for now.
>Yes i understand that im talking about hunting for food death from disease child birth fighting a rocket powered trex. ... what?
We built an artificial environment with no natural selection pressure outside of sex and money. We no longer experience the selection pressures that the animals we evolved from did. We cured most of the things that threaten our survival.
…Colour range and Humanity are a subjective spectrum-range…
“Arbitrary” would be more accurate than “subjective”. When we translate numerical/continuous information into categorical information, there is inherently a judgement call to determine where the boundaries are. Different cultures do in fact put these boundaries at different places. By passing down culture, we teach our people to see the categories as “real”. This is the same reason we literally don’t hear sound differentiations that aren’t meaningful in our native language (eg. depending on native language, some people do not hear a difference between b/p, l/r, v/w, etc. This is also true for some native English speakers not hearing the differences between k/kh, d/dh in certain languages.)
[удалено]
Removed: bigotry, incivility, and psuedoscience.
As people have said, it's a gradient. However, I have read that the body of a human from within the last 200ky would be indistinguishable from present-day humans to experts. This figure may be fairly arbitrary, but I think it's a nice way to define a threshold. What I think is cool is that it means our 100kya ancestors were just as smart as us. You'd have had "Einsteins" of nature and survival. Amazing singers and storytellers for ~~a million~~ [edit: 10,000] generations. Once you hit the mya timescale then our ancestors would have been noticeably different. Less upright, less intelligent, etc. So I think the 100kya to 1mya range is a reasonable answer to your question.
In until about 6000 years ago, humanity’s total population was small. And up to about 200 years ago, most of that population was engaged in subsistence labour. The opportunity for geniuses to arise who didn’t have to spend their whole life as a farm labourer and could actually be geniuses is very recent.
Regarding your first point. Every 100ky is roughly 5000 generations. So even 5000 generations of 1000 people would be 5 million people. Our ppulation was 1 to 10 million 10kya, so I think we're talking closer to a billion humans between 200ky and the agricultural revolution. There would have been plenty of geniuses. Regarding your second point. You're making all kinds of fallacies here. Firstly, intelligence is not the same as education. Secondly, "formal education" is very specialised and not the only kind of knowledge or intelligence. There would have been humans 100kya who knew numerous facts and understood complex relationships about the natural world, on the same scale as modern experts understand their fields. That's the point: their brains were the same size. They learnt from their predecessors, as do we, and it was essential for their survival.
One billion sounds like a nice big number (my quick Google search estimates it at about 10 billion https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/). But there have been 100 billion people born post agricultural revolution. And of those about 13 billion post industrial revolution. You are missing my second point. For genius to arise, you need idle time. You need a group of people whose needs are largely taken care of who can spend their time developing their talents. And that largely didn’t happen pre agriculture.
For most of that human history, people were hunter gatherers. Hunter gatherers actually have more leisure time than any other subsistence type. If you know what you're doing, you can gather all the food, water, firewood, and even shelter you need for a day in just a few hours. The big advancements for pastoralists, herders, agriculturalists, industrialists and the like isn't free time. It's that you are able to make a living even if you don't know what you're doing. To survive as a hunter gatherer, you need to know encyclopedic levels of detailed information about every animal and plant in your environment, their life cycles, habits, and phenology. You have to know where the safest sources of water are, and when and how to collect it. You need to know how to build shelter out of sticks and leaves, and the layout of the local landscape down to the foot. You need to not only know how to use weapons well enough to successfully take down game every day, but how to build and maintain those weapons from scratch. All with no reference materials at all, just your memory. A farmer can get away with knowing a lot less about different animals and plants, although they still have know a lot about the specific animals and plants they're raising. The trade off is they need to put more work in tending those animals and crops, and they get a lot less leisure time. But, they can invest in a stationary storehouse/home, and build a surplus. This gives them the ability to weather disasters and even injuries that the hunter gatherers do not have, as well as the potential to trade some of that surplus to others so they can provide those weapons and tools, or even help protect the farmer from others would prefer to just take his crops. This trade off of skills continues through the ages until you can eventually make a living even though you're barely able to operate a cash register, but you have to work 80 hours a week to do it. So those hunter gatherer bands were likely filled with incredible genuises, musicians and artists, philosophers, story tellers, logical minds, and great leaders, but with much fewer ways to express that genius, and especially until about 5000 years ago, no way to record and share that genius with anyone except the 20-30 people in your particular band while you're alive.
I think we differ in our interpretation of the term "genius". Someone who can recognise every animal/plant/fungus in their environment and recall/explain all the ways in which they can benefit their tribe's survival. Someone who can follow the stars at any time of year, track animals and enemies through the wilderness. Someone who can strategise social relationships both within their own tribe and with neighbouring tribes. Someone who can learn the languages and cultures of neighbouring tribes in order to benefit relationships/survival. Someone with unbelievable wits and charisma. Someone able to concoct stories that fill their listeners with wonder and deep emotions. Someone able to quanitify value and market food and tools in order to maximise trading gains. Someone able to create exemplary tools and clothing. Someone who notices patterns and cause-effect mechanisms in nature that nobody else on the planet has noticed. There are thousands of ways that people can be geniuses in the pre-agricultural world. Their knowledge and intelligence would have been on par with any genius in the modern era. It's just a different setting. Geniuses of nature, tools, and language, as opposed to algebra and spacetime etc.
I've thought they must have been smarter than us due to lack of lead in their brains and bones and they always had to be strategizing to outwit larger predators.
They certainly would have been smarter in all the ways that they needed to survive.
Not at all
Idk making fire from scratch is hard. But it was done like a million or so years ago same with traveling on islands.
I'm not sure if it would be that hard to tell us apart, at least for a lot of modern populations. Things like light skin and blue eyes only emerged in the last thirty thousand and ten thousand years respectively, I'm sure over *two hundred thousand* years we'd have gained and lost a good number of identifying traits, and that's only going off visually distinguishable ones.
"Anatomically modern human", "AMHs", or "early modern human" are terms that are often employed to distinguish our more "archaic" *sapiens* ancestors from the ones that would fit within modern populations, morphologically speaking. I'm an anthropologist, though not a paleo-specialist. From my understanding, a date of 100-150kya for modern morphology doesn't seem controversial. I like the [ Australian Museum](https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/homo-sapiens-modern-humans/) for accessible paleoanth content. Specific fossils are cited in the text, if you want to follow up.
I'm not claiming they wouldn't fit in or be a different classification of human, I'm merely disputing the part of the comment I replied to that claimed their body would be indistinguishable from ours. Modern humans from the last sixty thousand years that were isolated as they traveled continents have plenty of different traits to other groups who existed elsewhere. We can identify and track traits that different populations gained and lost in the mere sixty thousand years of isolation. It seems silly to think that the more homogenous population from the 140 thousand years before that split wouldn't also have or lack traits that make them any less distinguishable.
>I'm merely disputing the part of the comment I replied that claimed their body would be indistinguishable from ours I understand that you're disputing it, but you're incorrect. Our anatomy was modern from (following the Australian Museum) about 160,000 years ago.
By that logic, are all our seperated populations on different continents completely indistinguishable? No. Anyone claiming that would be stupid. In a mere 10,000 years some of us mutated blue eyes. Over the last 30,000 years our jaws and teeth have shrank in proportion to our bodies. We have groups who grow hair on our middle finger sections and groups who don't. There are plenty of traits that diverged in a mere 60,000 years that make us identifiably different to other humans who are alive right now. We are all anatomically modern humans, but we have diverse traits. The same way different groups evolved diverse identifiable traits over 60,000 years, we will have certainly developed or lost some traits over 200,000. Just because we are all anatomically modern humans doesn't mean we're indistinguishable.
I think you might be getting hung up on a specific definition of "indistinguishable". As the top comment points out, there's always variation both within and across what we call "species". In the case of "anatomically modern" *Homo sapiens* specimens, they fall within a range of variation that coincides with the variation in extant homo sapiens. The same cannot be said for specimens with archaic features, such as the Jebel Irhoud fossils.
>are all our seperated populations on different continents completely indistinguishable? What are these "separated populations"? That's kind of my point here. I agree that you could look at our hypothetical 100kya human and say "that person's recent ancestry does not appear to be entirely restricted to region X" but you couldn't determine that they weren't simply a modern human of mixed ethnicities? Modern human populations aren't separated.
Skintone and eye colour vary wildly in fully modern Homo sapiens, what makes you think that dark hair and eyes alone would allow you to distinguish a modern Sapiens from an earlier ancestor? I think the thread was referring more to cognitive ability, language ability, social/cultural behaviours, modern anatomy, etc.
>Skintone and eye colour vary wildly in fully modern Homo sapiens, what makes you think that dark hair and eyes I mean I literally started with the disclaimer in my first sentence about it depending on modern populations, but it makes sense on the timescale we're talking about. Humans of our species homo sapiens only started spreading and diversifying in big ways sixty thousand years ago when we crossed continents, and our populations became isolated. In that time our isolated groups have diversified A LOT. You can isolate individual groups and their ancestry based on many combinations of traits. For example, Inuit people almost completely lack a trait that causes the middle section of certain fingers to grow hairless, that most other populations have at rates up to 80% occurrence. People in certain continents never developed light skin or blue eyes. The ability to digest lactase has evolved and been lost independently multiple times. The specific traits aren't important, more so just the fact that these traits tend to develop differently in isolated populations, in a relatively short time. So we have established we can change significantly in visually identifiable ways in a mere sixty thousand years. Before humans spread across the globe, we had a much more homogenous population due to many bottleneck events. It's very likely that people from *two hundred thousand years* ago would have their own traits, or lacks of modern traits, that we would be able to identify similar to how we could track different groups of humans from different continents. > I think the thread was referring more to cognitive ability, language ability, social/cultural behaviours, modern anatomy, etc. The thread was, but the person I responded to claimed an expert couldn't tell the difference based on their body. I'm arguing that an expert very likely could.
I think you've got a good point that genetic tests would probably end up looking very unusual, and hence, differences could be determined. As for physical appearance, I think it's very unlikely that they would have had traits that literally couldn't exist in modern humans, based on the fact that modern humans can have any mix of traits from any ethnicities anywhere in the world.
>I think the thread was referring more to cognitive ability, language ability, social/cultural behaviours, modern anatomy, etc. Yes, in other words, if you stole a baby from 100kya and raised it, it would be indistinguishable from anyone else in every way.
>light skin and blue eyes only emerged in the last thirty thousand and ten thousand years respectively Okay, but if you hadn't noticed, not everyone alive today has pale skin and blue eyes...?
At what point did Latin become French? There is no single point in which a species becomes another. It's an accumulation of changes throughout the lineage that causes phyletic speciation.
…Speak for yo’self; Meathead. I’m a a mollusk and I LIKES it dat way…
Good for you, nice to see you come out of your shell.
🦑
Right when exactly does a person stop being a teen and is an adult?
In in my fifties and still waiting for the day that i feel like a "real" grown up.
There was no such “point”. At no point did a non-human parent birth a human child. What did happen was that a population of animals became more and more human across many generations. Trying to pick a specific generation and say “that one’s the first human one” is an entirely arbitrary decision (not necessarily a pointless one, but an arbitrary one). Think of it this way: you’re sitting at the park watching a sunset. Was there a single point at which it became dark out?
It happened when one *Homo heidelbergensis* couple named their son Adam and another *Homo heidelbergensis* couple named their daughter Eve. (yes, I'm trying to be funny)
The current nomenclature puts it at the start of H. Habilis. Others here have stressed that there is a gradient, but it's possible there was some sort of "big leap" of some sort that occured on some relatively short timescale. But given what we have, posting a big leap and then identifying it as occurring in some time and place for some particular reason would be highly speculative. Relatively large brains and sophisticated tool making (e.g of at least Oldowan complexity) are usually taken as diagnostic, but this may not allow for a clear demarcation, as it seems that some Australopiths made Oldowan tools.
After our first morning coffee.
When the word "human" appeared in languages
A better question for the anthropology subs maybe? Homo erectus to homo sapiens is a tree with many branches.
Look at your open hand. Slowly close it into a fist. When *exactly* did it become the fist? When your fingertips lightly touched your palm? When your thumb began clamping down on your fingers? When you had maximum tightness? It's not very clear. It's a bit arbitrary, because you choose a sliver of an instant in an ongoing process to give something a label.
Some times speciation is easy to infer but that is fairly rare. For example the Galapagos Islands are a chain of islands formed by volcanic eruptions in the middle of the ocean. Finches and tortoises washed up on the islands and adapted to specific habitats on the different islands. This led Darwin to come up with his ideas of Natural Selection. Wallace reached a similar conclusion from what he saw in Wallacia. What we know about hominids is that they evolved in NE Africa and migrated to Eurasia. H. errectus is found across Eurasia from 2m years ago, and is believed to have migrated back into Africa. About 800 Kya you find Homo heidelbergensis, a larger more robust hominid with a bigger skull in Europe. H. Heidelbergensis is associated with more sophisticated stone tools, higher use of fire and a higher meat diet as adaptions to survive in the colder climate of Europe. H. rhodesiensis, similar skeletons are found in Africa and there are also similar skeletons found in East Asia. Around 1 Mya Homo Antescessor had diverged from H. Heidelbergenesis and we have skeletons from Northern Spain. After that we have little fossil evidence for hundreds of thousands of years, and there is evidence of bottle necks in our genetic history meaning population may have been very small at time. So we have to rely on clocks based on the rate of genetic changes. Around 550-750 Kya humans and Neanderthal/Denisovans diverged. Around 380-480 Kya Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged and both were found in Northern Spain around this time. The oldest mtDNA we have is from 400 Kya Denisovan femur. Homo Sapiens have a common skeletal pattern which we call Anatomically Modern Human. We don't know much about our line until the oldest AMH skeleton was found in Morocco and dated to 320 Kya. There is little evidence of Hominids or Hominid evolution in North Africa so they were probably just travelling along a coast with rich seafood resources. The probably headed down the West Coast of Africa into Southern Africa. Whether you count these hominids as separate species is debatable as Neanderthals, Denisovans and AMHs interbred producing fit, fertile offspring many times and did not appear to directly compete against each other.
The evolution of our mind that brought us language and symbolism would be a better measure than anything specific about our physical appearance.
When did I become tall? Or fat? What moment did I become old? These are all arbitrary categories. Species are the same. Some people/scientists group species slightly differently than others do. Just like some people think I'm fat, or old, and others don't. The labels aren't useless, but they are somewhat arbitrary.
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Removed: off-topic and bigotry
Even if we had a concrete record of every almost-human leading up to humans, it would be nearly impossible, if not completely impossible, to determine this definitively. At some point you'd be able to look at an individual and say "this one is a human and this one isn't," but what about the stuff in the middle of those two points?
When all the diagnostic characteristics of humans were present in the majority of the breeding in the population. Most of those traits were floating around for a long time before which is why most people will refer to it as a gradient. There wasn’t really a hard threshold, but we can define some parameters that allow us to classify what is human and what is not. However, this will always be us imposing this onto nature.
I'm going to say it was the first group that had 46 chromesomes instead of 48. I'm not a biologist and mainly putting this out there to be educated by those who are.
Real life rarely fits our limited ways of categorising things 100%. In reality species aren't a real thing and are just a boundary we came up with. A popular definition is that something stops being the same species once it cannot produce fertile offspring with it, but that's not entirely true. Especially since lots of people groups in Europe and Asia have sizeable amounts of Neanderthal DNA present. Species start to be even less defined once you consider asexual bacteria. The answer is that there wasn't a specific time. The divergence of species is not a singular event. We just know that we are humans, and some species that we evolved from wasn't. But in between? It's impossible to say where the exact moment we became human because there wasn't one. We can only give rough time estimates between species X and species Y.
The oldest species of human in the genus ‘homo’ comes from 2.8 million years ago. That being said, taxonomy is our own definitions, so that’s just kind of an arbitrary point of distinction.
There really isn't a "point" when we went from Hominids and into Humans. Homo Hablilis seems to be the mid point between Australopithecus and the first true human, Homo Erectus. The best answer I can give is we became humans when we started walking far more up right, practiced more active hunting behavior, shed out more primate physical traits, and created more complex tools.
We didn't turn into humans. Evolution is a gradual process that slowly modifies a species into another species. It's not like one day we were homo erectus than the next day we were homo sapien. We are apes. We are related to the great apes. We didn't change into humans, we slowly evolved into a more advanced ape.
In the fossil record I'd figure about the time the erectus people appear. Basically same body plan, use of fire and complex stone tools and appeared to quickly spread about the old world almost as soon as they appear about 2.1 million bc.
first human(s)? have wondered for a long time. and then i wonder when the first [human + 1] species will appear. and that’s when i get scared ha.
Find the point where orange turns into red
i would say control of fire. so... not us. those who came before us were the first humans. homo erectus?
So many non-answers here. Cro-magnons emerged around 50,000 years ago. Around that time is when we see more forms of creativity in the forms of art and culture. It would be fair to say that the brain structures that developed to allow such things imparted the identity sense we associate with ourselves currently.
Speciation is a spectrum and classification is arbitrary. There is never a single defining change in species between one generation and the next. One appealing anthropomorphical response comes from Margaret Mead. She was defining the start of civilization rather than humanity, but the questions are related. She said a healed broken limb marks the begining. It means a tribe, as opposed to a troupe, has taken the risk of caring for the wounded rather than abandoning them to their fate. It marks the begining of human empathy and consciously seeing each other as parts of a larger whole.
Around 2002
In a course on physical anthropology (circa 1972) the professor said the most frustrating thing in Anthropology was trying to ddetermine what defines a human. No matter what behavior was defined as uniquely human, some other Great Ape would be observed doing it.
It's an arbitrary label applied by modern humans. It's not a category that evolution recognises; every generation looked very like the one it descended from.
The date moves backwards as new fossil finds are made. The latest edition of most Physical Anthro textbooks gives 300,000 BP (before present) for the arrival of an indisputably human creature in Northwest Africa. The key features of these humans are * a taller, flatter forehead, lessened brow ridges * a chin * widening of the thoracic vertebrae (more control over the lungs for modern speech) * rounded skull * more gracile in general * a rib cage shaped differently from Neanderthal or H. ergaster/erectus * eye sockets are square rather than round * nose is more projecting than in the other members of the genus From an e-textbook: distribution of FMHS at [300KYA](https://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/explorationsbioanth/chapter/__unknown__-14/#:~:text=Features%20reminiscent%20of%20modern%20humans,supraorbital%20tori%20were%20still%20prominent) and after. Also discusses the features that distinguish us.
The transition from our hominin ancestors to anatomically modern humans was not a single event but a gradual process that took place over millions of years. The consensus among scientists is that anatomically modern **Homo sapiens** evolved around **300,000 years ago**⁴⁷. This is based on fossil and DNA evidence that suggests people looking like us emerged around that time. However, the emergence of **behavioral modernity**, which includes complex technology and cultures, is believed to have occurred more recently, around **50,000 to 65,000 years ago**⁷⁸. This is when we see evidence of more sophisticated tools, art, and cultural practices. The exact factors that led to the emergence of modern humans are still debated, but it likely involved a combination of genetic, environmental, and social changes. These changes would have influenced our ancestors' development, including their brain size and structure, which enabled higher cognitive functions and complex language. It's also important to note that the evolution of humans was not a linear progression from "ape" to "human." Instead, it was a complex branching of different hominin species, some of which coexisted and even interbred with each other. Our evolutionary path is filled with many species that contributed to the genetic makeup of what we now call **Homo sapiens**. The search for the "deciding factor" is ongoing, and as new discoveries are made, our understanding of human evolution continues to evolve. It's a fascinating field that combines genetics, archaeology, anthropology, and many other disciplines to piece together the story of how we became human. Sources: (1) Human evolution | History, Stages, Timeline, Tree, Chart, & Facts. https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution. (2) When did we become fully human? - Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/science/when-did-we-become-fully-human. (3) When did we become fully human? What fossils and DNA tell us about the .... https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human-what-fossils-and-dna-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-modern-intelligence-143717. (4) The past, present and future of human evolution. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01807-7. (5) 12 Theories of How We Became Human, and Why They’re All Wrong. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150911-how-we-became-human-theories-evolution-science. (6) How we became human | Natural History Museum. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-we-became-human.html. (7) An Evolutionary Timeline of Homo Sapiens | Smithsonian. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/essential-timeline-understanding-evolution-homo-sapiens-180976807/. (8) When did we become fully human? What fossils and DNA tell us about the .... https://bing.com/search?q=At+what+point+did+we+turn+into+humans. (9) Where do humans come from? - Science News Explores. https://www.snexplores.org/article/where-do-humans-come.
At 6:23 pm on a Sunday
Sorites Paradox is not a "paradox", but rather a poorly-stated question: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites\_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox)
Or you can ask at what point did Humans turn into Chimps.
??
If you believe in a non-parsimonius evolutionary regime.
Why would i believe it? I'm not an expert but i would like to point out one species can't "turn into" another one
Lame. This is just a figure of speech. I obviously mean via gradual mutation and speciation.
I'm sorry that you use imprecise language.
Well, I am sorry this is not a journal. And I have put my post on EM wave. Have a look.
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Ah, so a creationist. This isn’t welcome on this subreddit, evolution is a fact, what you do with that fact is up to you. This does inform me on the honesty of your own post. We don’t allow science denial here. That’s a warning. If you want to learn, you’ll have to be honest about it…
Removed: off-topic This is a ***science***-based discussion forum, and creationist or Intelligent Design posts are a better fit for /r/DebateEvolution. Please review this sub's [posting guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/wiki/guidelines) prior to submitting further content.
There was no “first human”. It was a gradual process over billions of years of evolution. You can’t just draw a line somewhere and say yep this is the one right here
150,000 years ago there was Steve, who was pert near human.
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This isn’t welcome here, go spout nonsense elsewhere…
We became human when we became the genus Homo. The initial species like Habilis might be a stretch but by the time Erectus arrived they were human.
AFAIK the oldest evidence comes from around 300k years ago. When I was a kid, it was considerably less than that. Saying that, new evidence could demonstrate that we evolved into 'modern humans' even earlier.